When I was a kid, my family would drive up the coast for vacation every summer. We’d always spend a few nights at The Beacon Hotel. The hotel was a wonderful old building on a bluff overlooking the sound, full of the antique nautical stuff you’d expect to find in an old seaside hotel – lamps made out of driftwood, old ship hardware, paintings of sailboats.
The beacon that the hotel was named after was adjacent to the hotel property. The North Bluffs Beacon was a forty-foot tower built from huge black stones, topped with a bright light that was focused into a beam by a set of mirrors and an ancient Fresnel lens.
The beacon was operated by a man everyone called the beacon master. When I was a kid, he was a fifty-something year-old man with a short white beard and a dark blue uniform. Every summer, when we pulled the car into the hotel parking lot, he would give us a little wave from the lawn next to the beacon.
I loved the hotel pool, and I spent most of my time in the water when we stayed there. Sometimes I spied on the beacon master while I was mostly submerged in the deep end. He seemed to always be on the lawn by the tower. Sometimes he would fiddle with some part of the beacon, but he usually just stood on the edge of the bluff, pocket watch in hand, staring out into the ocean.
The beacon master turned the beacon light on each night, exactly ninety minutes after sundown. The beacon pulsed in a pattern: one second on, seven seconds off. Even on a clear night, the beam was bright enough to illuminate water droplets and dust in the air, forming a cone of light that reached out over the dark ocean, trying to illuminate infinity.
This was in the 1970s. I know that’s not exactly the information age, but certainly the beacon could have been automatically switched on and off. Why did it need a full-time operator? And, come to think of it, the beacon master’s uniform wasn’t a uniform of any organization I’d ever heard of. It wasn’t a Navy or Coast Guard uniform. What was he, exactly?
When I was a kid, though, these questions never occurred to me. If anyone else thought something was unusual about the beacon master, they never mentioned it to me. I just accepted him and the beacon as a normal part of my happy childhood summers.
Forty years later, a business meeting with a potential new customer brought me back to the northern coast. My meeting was close to the Beacon Hotel and I decided it would be fun to visit one of my favorite childhood vacation sites. I pulled into the hotel driveway, half expecting a wave from the beacon master on the lawn next door. He wasn’t there. Of course. He would have been at least a hundred years old by that point.
There was something different about the beacon. The light and mirrors and lens had been removed from the top. I left my luggage in the car and walked across the lawn to the black stone tower. A cast-iron fence surrounded the old structure. The grass inside the fence was knee high – whoever mowed this lawn wasn’t able to get in to trim around the base of the tower. A small plaque was mounted on a boulder in front of the tower. It said:
Construction of the North Bluffs Beacon began in 1845 and was completed in 1847. The beacon operated continually from 1847 until 1862, providing navigation for ships as far away as White Island. The North Bluffs Beacon was decommissioned in 1862 and its gas light and lens moved to the Oak Hill lighthouse.
I read the plaque again. And a third time. I had seen the beacon operate. Many times. I had even met the beacon master. I’d understand if the plaque said the beacon was decommissioned in the 1980s, or something like that. But it said that the beacon had been decommissioned a century before I was even born.
I asked the hotel staff about it, but they just echoed what the plaque said. No, they never saw the beacon operate. No, they’d never met the beacon master. It’s always been just a stone tower in the middle of the lawn next to the hotel. I fell asleep confused. Had I somehow made up all of memories of the beacon? Was I confusing some other part of my childhood with our vacations at the Beacon Hotel?
I awoke that night to a flash. A light from outside lit up the room for an instant. Lightening? I started counting the seconds until I heard thunder. I like estimating how far away thunderstorms are. But the thunder never came. My count reached seven seconds and another flash lit up the room.
I ran to the window. The beacon was operating. It flashed again, and I saw the silhouette of a man standing on the bluff. A man holding a pocket watch.
I flung clothes on and sprinted outside. The beacon master stood at the base of the tower, waiting for me. I don’t mean a beacon master waited for me. I mean it was the same guy from when I was a kid. He hadn’t aged at all.
The beacon flashed again. The beacon master looked as his pocket watch.
“Right on schedule,” he said.
“What is on schedule?”
“You.” He closed his pocket watch with a snap and slid it into a pocket on his uniform. “And the ship.” He pointed to the sea.
I looked out over the bluff and saw only blackness and distant lights from vessels underway in the sound. “What ship?”
He didn’t have to answer me. The beacon flashed again and I saw it.
The blackness that I thought was the vastness of the nighttime ocean, and the lights that I thought were distant boats were neither. The blackness was the hull of a huge black ship that sat a few hundred feet off the shore. The lights were from structures on its deck.
The ship was impossible. It couldn’t exist. But it did. It was a wooden ship, built approximately in the shape of an old Spanish Galleon. But it was scaled up to the size of an oil tanker. No – it was way larger than an oil tanker. Larger than anything manmade that had ever floated. The bow faced the bluff and the stern was nearly lost to sight in distance.
The hull rose nearly a hundred feet out of the water, putting the deck at the same level as the hotel and beacon on the bluff. The deck, though, wasn’t a normal ship’s deck. It was a town. A city. A city with buildings, streets, gas-fired street lamps, and large looming structures lined with columns. A city that looked like a distorted version of Victorian era London was somehow built onto the deck of this immense black hulk.
The beacon flashed again. “The ship,” the beacon master said, “has come a very long way, to pick up and transport a single passenger. You.”
“Transport me where?”
“To the far beacon, of course.”
I tried to make sense of the ship. The city on the deck was madness. Just looking at it raised unanswerable questions which in turn raised even more unanswerable more questions. I concentrated instead on the black-painted hull. The volume of the ship was immense. Covered football stadiums are smaller. I sensed that there was something inside. Someone inside. An entity, looking back at me.
“Who is onboard?” I asked.
“Just the pilot.”
“A ship this size is crewed by one person?”
“The pilot is traveler,” the beacon master answered, as if that explained everything.
The wind changed slightly, and I for a moment I heard a harpsichord playing single notes in a tuneless, random melody.
I looked back towards the ship. My eye was drawn to one of the larger structures on the deck – a tall building with enormous arched windows. Something moved within. I squinted at the building. The lights were on inside, and the windows were large enough for me to get a glimpse of an opulent interior space. Like a ballroom. I saw movement inside the building again. I focused on the window where the motion occurred. There was a circular object behind the window. What was it? It looked a little like a fountain. Or maybe a large floral arrangement.
The harpsichord music returned - an unpleasant and incomprehensible sequence of lonely, single notes. The object in the window moved. No, it blinked. It closed and opened again like an enormous eye.
“Ready to board?” The music grew louder.
“No. Nonono.” I stammered and stepped backwards – away from the beacon and away from the ocean. “No. I can’t get on that. No.”
“So, you want to risk go around again instead of boarding?”
“Yes!” I had no idea what he was talking about. I just needed to not get on that ship. I needed to get away from whatever terrifying entity was staring at me from inside it.
“Very well. Look at the beacon.”
The beacon grew as bright as the sun. Then it was the sun – I was lying on my back squinting into the bright summer sky. Faces looked down at me with concern.
“You had us scared! You stopped breathing for a good minute and a half.”
I sat up. I was next to the hotel pool. The sun beat down from straight above. The pool was full. And I was a child again.
By letting me “go around again,” the beacon master somehow sent me back to my childhood while preserving my memories and experience from my previous life. You might think that getting a chance to do your whole life over again would be great. It isn’t.
My family, my friends. Everyone. They’re the same, but … scrambled. The guy who taught music in high school is my father. The man who was my father is now the guy works at the hardware store. The guy who worked at the hardware store is my brother. My mother became my aunt. The woman who lived three doors down is now my mother. And so on. Like everyone but me was just playing a part, then, when I was “reset” in the pool, they all changed costumes and the same actors are playing different roles. But they’re not actors. It’s real.
Nothing played out exactly the same as the first time I was alive. I tried buying stocks in companies that were mega-successful. But this time around, it’s other companies that make the iPods and run the chains of coffee shops. I didn’t do poorly, but I’ve got the same job as before. I have the same personality. The same set of flaws. For the first forty years, “going around again” just felt like four decades of watching reruns.
But then the world of “the second go round” started to degrade.
First, I started hearing the music. The same tuneless, meandering melody I heard drifting from the black ship is present everywhere. I hear it in the birds’ songs, and the sounds of refrigerator motors, and noise of car horns in traffic. It’s like the inherent randomness of the true reality is “leaking through” the walls of the bubble we call reality. The real universe is a tuneless, pointless, unending melody. And only I can hear it.
Then I started meeting the shifted people. The first time I met them was in the grocery store. A middle-aged man and woman. Nicely dressed. They stood face-to-face in the aisle, ignoring everything but each other.
They started talking to each other when I tried to maneuver my shopping cart past them.
“Transport me where?” the man said. He had a high, squeaky voice and spoke rapidly.
“To the far beacon,” the woman answered in an even higher, squeakier voice.
“Transport me where?” the man said again.
“To the far beacon.” She answered.
They were repeating a part of my own conversation with the beacon master. A conversation I held forty years ago and four hundred miles away. That conversation was – I don’t know – shifted in time and space, and between individuals. I opened my mouth to say something to them – I wasn’t sure what, words were still forming as I took in a breath to talk. But before I could say anything, they both started humming the same tuneless random melody that pervaded my life.
I stood in front of them for ten minutes while they hummed the strange sequence of notes. Other shoppers passed us without seeming to notice. I finally walked away, leaving them humming in the middle of the aisle.
The shifted people were still in the grocery store when I returned a week later. Still standing in the middle of the aisle, humming the song of randomness. I walked out the instant I saw them, and never went back.
Soon shifted people started showing up in other places. An elderly couple on the bus:
“Transport me where?” she asked.
“To the far beacon,” he said.
They repeated the snippet of my conversation with the beacon master in high-pitched, squealy voices over and over until I finally told them to stop. They did. But then both started humming the melody of random notes. That happened on bus number 523. They were still on that same bus two weeks later. I stopped riding the bus after that.
They show up everywhere now. Parking lots. The lobby of my office. Everywhere. A new pair of shifted people shows up somewhere about every two weeks. And they don’t go away. I can see six of them from my kitchen window. Two in front of the apartment mailboxes and four on the walkway.
The “go around” that the beacon master granted me was not a lap around the happy merry go round of life, but another turn of a downwards spiral, deeper into the incomprehensible substrate of the cosmos.
I returned to the Beacon Hotel after I saw the shifted people on the bus. Ready, this time, to board the ship. The hotel still existed, but the beacon was gone. A small triptych of pictures in the hotel lobby told the story. The land next to the hotel was purchased to build houses and the beacon was torn down. A big storm hit and caused enough erosion at the base of the bluff to condemn the land, and the houses were never built.
Yesterday, I became “shifted” myself, for a little while. I found myself standing in a park near my house – no memory of walking there. I was shouting “Who is onboard?” over and over again, to nobody.
It’s been sixty-five years since I the beacon master sent me on my second go-around. I’ve lived long enough to see a few new things that I did get to see the first time. Like the Internet.
That’s why I’m online today. Maybe I can use this Internet to find someone with a similar experience. I want to find the beacon. Or another beacon. I want to get on that damn ship. That’s why I’m posting my story wherever I can. Maybe someone out there knows of a beacon by the sea. One that turns on ninety minutes after sundown. One that’s manned by a beacon master. One that is an endpoint for a traveler in his dark ship.